BackgroundResults emerging from multiple research projects have been showing promising possibilities for the inclusion of ICT in schools. However, the actual adoption of ICT in schools is much less successful. Although several factors might be at play, we believe that two important ones concern the need to foster knowledge in schools regarding:- The connections between their existing technological infrastructure, its potential for teaching and the possibility of repurposing these technologies in accordance with concrete pedagogical goals.- Ways to implement sustainable ICT policies, acknowledging digital technologies trends, novel pedagogical practices and empowering primary users and relevant stakeholders.ObjectivesThe project promoted practices to help schools reach an e-mature level (as explained by the NCTE). More specifically, the project focused on the wise use of ICT in schools and to ensure that teachers, students and other stakeholders are able to:- Exploit the benefits of the investments made in ICT infrastructure,- Gather and document successful ideas on how to apply innovative uses of ICT infrastructures at schools and support the exchange of such practices,- Reflect on and promote the adoption of novel educational models, ideas and experiences that link digital artefacts and learning.The consortiumThe project’s partners Departments from University Education of Weingarten (Germany), the Open University of Cyprus (Cyprus) and Linnaeus University (Sweden) have a long experience in: (i) teacher training, (ii) fostering the implementation of novel pedagogical practices in schools and (iii) leading research projects in education and ICT in schools. This experience also translates into close partnerships with schools at regional level as well as established relationships with educational organisations at national and international level.Description of activitiesThe project run for three years. Initially, the ICT infrastructure as well as the e-maturity of the participating schools and the practices regarding the ICT infrastructure at schools were assessed and analysed in close cooperation with the school teachers. Corresponding information was analysed at different levels of abstraction, taking the form of scenarios and patterns, and collected in the eSIT4SIP inventory, which was complemented with OER resources from the web. Furthermore, the consortium designed and created a digital environment utilizing the eSIT4SIP knowledge base that facilitates the effective search and reflection on the analysis outputs created. The system contains a decision support component, allowing to search for technological alternatives with educationally equivalent functionality. All these together allow for an innovation process that enables stakeholders to reflect on their current practices, consider alternatives and design modifications. MethodologyThe initial analysis of the schools’ existing infrastructures was performed by the consortium through visits and interviews in close collaboration with the partner schools. Additional OER resources were discovered and integrated with a web-scraping approach. The development of the knowledge base contained the design and implementation of ontologies for learning and infrastructure, to provide for enhanced search mechanisms. The knowledge base was developed taking a design-based approach with a strong focus on usability issues, thus targeting to provide optimal support for users.Results and impactThe activities referred to above generated the following:- A knowledge-base (KB) collecting practices' descriptions, allowing searching and browsing for ICT-related learning scenarios and instructional design patterns, available at www.esit4sip.eu. - A dynamic and integrated inventory of learning scenarios and instructional design patterns, currently around 300 scenarios, drawn from participating schools and as OER from different sources in the web, provided to the public via the eSIT4SIP KB. - An innovation process utilizing the KB and its inventory, including a general mechanism to identify alternative implementations of learning scenarios with the above listed types of technologies and tools, based on the invention of the concepts of micro-activities and learning tool affordances.- The design of a recommender system, which suggests to teachers scenarios that could be implemented in their teaching given their didactic problems and opportunities and the infrastructure available.Long term benefitsthe project’s results can provide a set of tools that will enable schools to reflect on their current ICT strategies and pedagogical goals. In turn, such reflection will empower schools to refine their ICT strategic plans and be able to reach an e-maturity level. The more such a system is used the richer its knowledge base and the more relevant its recommendation become.

"Education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the great challenges today. The goal of ESD is to open up educational opportunities to all people, which will enable them to acquire knowledge and values, behaviours and lifestyles that are necessary for a future worth living. The Friday for future movement shows the strong desire of young people all over the world to realize these goals in taking actions against climate change to be able to ""live in harmony in nature"", a demand in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. School gardens (SGs) as authentic learning environments are promising settings to develop stainable relevant competences. Garden-based learning activities provide students with necessary basic knowledge to understand ecological coherences which are the key to further understanding. Especially in urban areas, SGs can be biodiversity hotspots and refuges for plants and animals. Students gain insight into life cycles and get aware of the importance of seasonality and regionality by growing organic food for healthy nutrition. SGs make a valuable contribution to the development of social skills and enable the integration of people of different cultures, and with the positive effects on problematic behaviour preventing early school leaving. That makes SGs to ideal places for experiencing education for sustainable development. Acting locally students gain basic ideas for global thinking. A SG as a miniature edition of a piece of the world can provide real-life conditions to take ecological, economic and social decisions. But these benefits are not yet visible for all educators - they are not aware of the potential lying in this learning environment and often lack school gardening expertise as it was not necessarily part of their academic courses or vocational training. In the school curricula, the implementation of ESD as a key perspective is wildly spread all over Europe but a lot of educators need support by implementing these goals into their daily routine.Many individual SG initiatives have been established in different European countries, with a multitude of concepts and didactic approaches. Likewise, school gardening in each country is based on its specific cultural traditions. In Europe SGs have a long tradition - the Czech priest Johann Amos Comenius mentioned 1657 in the Didactica Magna, the first didactic book for teachers, already the value of SGs for children's education. Nowadays, SGs are often used to learn cultural techniques in growing vegetables and fruits. After the agriculture’s green revolution and 1989, many school gardens in Eastern Europe were given up and used e.g. for sports activities. The challenges of ESD gave SGs a new chance: Many primary schools restarted school gardening with a focus on nature experience and science learning, with growing popularity. Planting seeds and watch them grow to vegetables is vital for the understanding of organic food and can influence children intake of it. These nature experiences are to prevent nature alienation. In secondary schools, gardens are mainly used for ecological and scientific learning in projects.The immense amount of knowledge and valuable information on school gardening techniques and didactic methods having accumulated across Europe is not visible for the community and, therefore, not available for teaching efforts. Fostering SGs activities in Europe by giving them an international platform is a potential way to reach teachers and early childhood educators as well as students and other gardening people. Being inspired by the activities of others they can pass on the knowledge about the importance of fresh and healthy food, regionally and seasonally grown, as well as the value of intact ecosystems and biological diversity to children and students. These topics are very important to change people’s habits towards more sustainability and, thus, are a prerequisite to improve their lives and to build greener and healthier societies. In this project, sustainable-relevant skills and competences for garden-based learning will be defined. The participants will develop a curriculum for the teachers training and ICT materials to share on the Erasmus+ online platform. There will be an exchange of experiences and a sharing of best practice with the focus on teachers and students as future educators. During a summer school with parts of blended learning, teachers can increase sustainable-relevant skills and competences in using SGs as learning environments. The project will unite existing national networks to a European one and so make ideas and benefits available for everyone. The translation of materials in different European languages will increase the reachability and lower language barriers. The direct contact and exchange on SG topics should decrease anti-Eastern and anti-Western prejudices. Global challenges can only be solved by international collaborations. This network might be the starting point."

"<< Background >>As any citizen, student-teachers and their teacher-educators constantly deal with global issues: migration, religions, intercultural dialogue, economic competition between nations, wars, global terrorism, hate speech, etc. Even though there are strong common points in approaching citizenship education within many liberal countries (valuing individual liberty, promoting tolerance towards other beliefs or values, etc.), each state tends to handle controversial issues in a culturally, and hence politically specified way. As a result, teacher-trainers are often required to follow national recommendations to equip future teachers to teach citizenship in line with a specified (national) conception of what ""kind of citizen"" pupils need to become. The needs of our target groups, notably student-teachers, are to realise and reflect upon the fact that 1° Their national conception of citizenship may be enriched when confronted to other conceptions of citizenship; 2° Many issues seem entirely consensual within one country but become much more controversial from a global point of view; 3° In the context of globalization, the issues that citizens (trainees, trainers, but also pupils) are facing are inherently global and need to be addressed more and more globally. Hence, as researchers and teacher educators, we assume that there is a need to have student teachers engage hands-on with authentic global interactions by using what may be seen as a global type of pedagogy. That is why the GlobalSense consortium, starting from already-existing collaborations in previous projects, decided to apply for an ambitious international project, as a means of making different countries collaborate together and share their conceptions of citizenship, in the context of teacher-training programs. The consortium gathers 4 full partner institutions (from France, Germany, Belgium, Israel) as well as an associated partner (from the United States) which will implement the same pedagogical activity. Additionally, GlobalSense involves numerous associated partners ranging from academic specialists to governmental and non-governmental organisations.<< Objectives >>The GlobalSense project fully takes the European context and requirements into account, in line with transnational endeavours such as the Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of Europe about Social and Civic Competencies (18 December 2006), the European Economic and Social Committee promoting ""A more inclusive citizenship open to immigrants"" (16 October 2013), or the Migrant Integration Policy Index Education Indicators (MIPEX) which measure the implementation of ""Education to diversity"" and ""Intercultural Education"" in secondary schooling. In line with these priorities related to inclusion, diversity, and anti-discrimination, the project has three main objectives: 1° To contribute to student-teachers training on global citizenship in secondary schools. 2° To help future teachers to deal with controversial civic topics in class. 3° To expose student-teachers to a variation of national views on citizenship and evaluate their influence on controversial national and global issues. More precisely, we will engage student-teachers, studying in higher education institutions from five different countries, in an e-collaborative pedagogical design of controversial topics in global civics. We aim at generating a dialogical milieu in which student-teachers can examine and refine their pedagogical ideas in light of critique and alternatives suggested by their peers from other countries, who might have different cultural and political views on the topic and different pedagogical approaches.<< Implementation >>The core activity will be a series of online collaborative teaching on the topics of i) international migration, ii) secular-religious relations. Each activity is three phasic. In phase 1, as part of each course requirements, students will be asked to design a lesson plan on international migration. The instructors will provide some background and various content materials, including materials prepared by the GlobalSense team, related to intercultural, inter-religious, or secular-religious relations. In phase 2, students will be divided into groups of 8, representatives from all the countries, based on criteria related to their lesson plans. All participants will be asked to read the first round of lesson plans of the fellow participants from the group and prepare questions regarding their pedagogical aspects. Following this preparation, in phase 3, students will interact online using zoom. The participants will exhibit their complete lesson plans. These presentations will be followed by a guided peer discussion, and participants will be asked to rewrite their lessons plans following the insights that came up in the online activity. The finalised lesson plans will be viewed and shared by all, part of them disseminated, and a multicultural sensitivity questionnaire will assess the transformation of student-teachers' multicultural and/or global sensitivity. Additionally, the consortium will organise bilateral exchanges between students. Each country will host four students during the last year of the implementation, providing them with the opportunity to deepen their understanding of a foreign approach of conceptualising citizenship as well as related controversial/international issues.<< Results >>The expected outcomes and results are as follows. 1° A database of lesson plans about global citizenship, made available for teacher-trainers in 5 countries and for secondary school teachers. 2° Data regarding the process that the student teachers went through as manifested in pre and post surveys documenting multicultural sensitivity. 3° Presentations in academic and non-academic public conferences, including through Erasmus+ Multiplier events. 4° Articles in academic journals. 5° Interactive online presentations explaining the core methodology, the concrete implementation, the possible obstacles and the most significant potentialities of this kind of teaching activity. 6° Identification of situated best practices through the fieldwork in terms of coordination between stakeholders and users (trainers, students) as well as their involvement in online interactions. 7° Policy recommendations: once best practices have been identified in terms of enhancing multicultural sensitivity and improving digital capabilities in higher education, the team will provide a report about administrative and policy arrangements favouring the educational aims of projects or initiatives that might be inspired by the GlobalSense activities. In sum, we aspire to influence the participating institutions to incorporate broadly international online interactions in their programs. We hope that such a pedagogy will be adopted in additional institutions of teacher education at the regional level in this manner, making it possible for more and more beginning teachers to feel prepared to talk, with pupils or students, about potentially controversial subjects - such as many subjects surrounding the fields of migrations and religions. Finally, the consortium aims to promote favouring conditions making it possible for other actors to reshape the GlobalSense method so that stakeholders (educational authorities, policymakers, trainers, teachers, non-school educators) can adopt it for their own purposes, targeting various publics and engaging various stakeholders."

R/EQUAL – Requalification of (Recently) Immigrated and Refugee Teachers in Europe A) Summary In times of increased migration since 2015, Europe has become a central destination for a high number of migrants and refugees worldwide. Sweden, Germany and Austria are the main target countries for many recently immigrated people from conflict and war zones. Within this group also teachers have come to Europe. The possibilities to acknowledge the qualifications of these highly skilled migrants vary according to the respective national migration policy and the regulations of teacher training. Most of these teachers cannot work as teachers in the host country without further qualification. (R)EQUAL focused on international networking and the exchange of expertise in the field of higher education activities concerning (recently) immigrated and refugee teachers in Europe. (R)EQUAL supports existing programmes at the Universities Stockholm, Vienna, Cologne and the University of Education Weingarten by collaborating on a European level. At the same time, the collected expertise for running a programme in the future was provided for other Higher Education Institutions in Europe. On this account open-access modules were developed: 1) a Theoretical Framework with a comparative analysis of the current regulations of teacher training for (recently) immigrated and refugee teachers in Sweden, Germany and Austria as well as the requalification partner programmes (Intellectual Output 1), 2) a Manual for language learning in multilingual contexts considering all language competencies existing in a translingual learning setting in Higher Education (Intellectual Output 2), 3) a Toolbox of teaching- and learning methods in Higher Education for working on the topic of heterogeneity in schools considering the European anti-discrimination policy (Intellectual Output 3),4) a Digital Library on scientific literature regarding teacher professionalisation and internationally trained teachers in international perspective including an own R/EQUAL interview study on programmes for (recently) immigrated and refugee teachers (Intellectual Output 4), 5) a General Guideline including an overview of the results of IO1 to IO5 as well as further recommendations to set up a programme for (recently) immigrated and refugee teachers (Intellectual Output 6).The decision on the participatory approach chosen for R/EQUAL was based on the overall conviction that the project activities need to be carried out together with the participating international teachers. Therefore (recently) immigrated and refugee teachers were involved in the development and application of the project results. The implementation of the chosen participatory approach has been evaluated within the project (Intellectual Output 5). B) Project Partners University of Cologne, Germany (lead, coordinator: Dr. Henrike Terhart) University of Vienna, Austria Stockholm University, Sweden University of Education Weingarten, Germany C) Duration September 2018 – March 2021

"The project ""LADECI – Language Acquisition within Democratic Citizenship Education"" has developed an in-service teacher training programme that combines methodological insights on language instruction and promotion and education for democratic citizenship in order to qualify in-service teachers to foster their students’ effective language acquisition while raising their awareness towards democratic values and processes at the same time. The project is an important contribution to the qualification of in-service teachers who have to organize their daily professional life in a world prone to continuous change and further differentiation which permanently generates new and altered contents to be approached in modified ways. Teachers need to be provided with support and advice to keep flexible and open towards this complex reality in order to create learning arrangements that allow their students to recognize this reality and, even more important, to participate in it. In times of globalization, which can be mainly characterized by movement, a great deal of which is actual migration of people for diverse reasons, teachers face many new challenges when dealing with heterogeneous, multilingual and multicultural target groups. Their major aim must be to realize successful inclusion of all their students into the teaching and learning processes and into school life. This also means that obstacles impeding inclusion have to be overcome. By providing an in-service teacher training programme that fosters language promotion, the LADECI-project focuses on helping to remove one of the most fundamental such obstacle, namely the one that many students have severe disadvantages since they do not know or speak the language of academic instruction of a certain country well enough to follow the lessons offered by this very same academic instruction. They do not have equal opportunities to make achievements but have much more difficulties to make a certain school career leading to an appropriate and successful professional career later on. The project provides in-service teachers with means to reduce this disparity by offering didactic clues, guidelines and material with the help of which the linguistic performance of students can be considerably improved. Embedding learning arrangements in education for democratic citizenship at the same time can make an important impact on equity and social cohesion. The complex world we all face can sometimes be felt as too much to be taken in. Easy explanations and short-term solutions may be desired, but they are often one-sided or partial. If teachers enable their students to speak up and discuss, to negotiate and balance whatever they perceive and how they see their peers and people around in particular, and to come up with more intricate answers that will not always be complete ones, they can have a hand in the development of a reflective, self-responsible and open future generation and thus in real sustainability. The LADECI training programme – properly implemented in school’s individual in-service training concepts is an important milestone on our way there."